‘It’s a long way,’ she said. ‘I can’t see much.’
‘Follow the treeline until you get to the vertical rock face. Go up a little and you’re there.’
‘Got it.’ The target didn’t exactly spring into view – the circles were tiny – but at least she could see the thing. ‘I hope this is going to be a lot easier when we get to Positano.’
Itchy didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he began to give her some figures to dial into the scope. She clicked the dials round.
‘All good,’ Itchy said, bending to the spotting scope. ‘Send when ready.’
Silva took several deep breaths and held steady. Did no more than caress the trigger.
A crack came from the rifle and Itchy was speaking long before the retort echoed back at them off the facing ridge. Silva noted the puff of dust fly out from the rocks above the target.
‘You’re two metres up and around thirty centimetres right.’
Silva made another adjustment to the scope and settled again.
Crack. A puff of dust.
Itchy gave her more instructions.
Crack. Dust. Crack. Dust.
Silva let off another shot and changed the magazine. Several more shots followed until a ping came back at them from the ridge.
‘Shot. You hit the plate.’
Another adjustment.
Crack. Ping.
And another.
Crack. Ping.
Finally, after a dozen more rounds, Itchy peered through his spotting scope. ‘Nice. That last one was almost dead centre. Let’s try some groupings now.’
With the scope adjusted, Silva shot through the rest of the magazines until they were out of ammunition.
‘You haven’t lost it, Silvi,’ Itchy said. ‘Those groupings. Tight as ever you were. The army must have been crazy to get rid of you.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I just did.’ Itchy grinned. ‘Come on. If we hike across to the target now, I can stick a new one up ready for tomorrow. Means I can have a lie-in.’
Silva pushed herself up from the ground and dusted herself off. She picked up the rifle and stared across to the far ridge. Positano at night was going to be a very different proposition.
‘We shoot tomorrow, but the day after we don’t come up here until sunset,’ Silva said. ‘We’ll take a couple of torches over to the targets to illuminate the area and shoot once it’s fully dark. We need to simulate the conditions.’
‘You’re right. Different atmospherics and temperature at night. We’ll have to account for the variation in humidity at the coast too.’ Itchy reached for the spotting scope and began to detach it from the tripod. ‘I didn’t factor that in. Stupid.’
Silva watched as Itchy packed away the kit. She wondered what else they hadn’t factored in.
The Border Force didn’t hang around and the next morning an email with several attachments dropped into Holm’s inbox. Javed stood by his shoulder as he opened one of the spreadsheets.
‘Jesus,’ Holm said as myriad lines of data scrolled on his screen. ‘Cornish was spot on. Needle in a haystack. I don’t see how we can find anything.’
‘Three months’ worth of container movements,’ Javed said. ‘Ten thousand containers a day, so that’s close to a million separate entries across all the spreadsheets.’
‘This is a nightmare.’ Holm took in the top few rows. Toys from China. Car parts from Hungary. Textiles from Vietnam. ‘We’ll be here until my retirement before we can make sense of this.’
‘Not at all. We’ll pull all the records into one file. Remove the ones unrelated to SeaPak and use a bit of programming to identify any anomalies. Write a formula or a macro or something.’
‘Hey?’
‘Do you mind, sir?’ Javed gestured at Holm’s seat. ‘If I could sit down and have a look. Perhaps this time you could get the coffees?’
For a moment Holm thought about saying he wasn’t anyone’s dogsbody, but then he looked at the rows and rows of figures on the screen. Clicking a mouse button was at the top end of his technical ability; formulas and macros were a foreign language. A coffee and a cake might be just the thing.
He went to the canteen where he bought two coffees and a couple of pastries and returned to his office to find Javed leaning back in the chair, working on his nails with his clippers.
‘We’ve hit gold, sir,’ Javed said, looking overly smug with himself as he gestured at the screen. ‘Took me all of five minutes.’
Holm sighed. He didn’t know if he was pleased or disappointed. ‘Show me.’
‘First, I extracted the SeaPak data. Then I de-duped the port destinations and the ship names, then—’
‘You what?’
‘Removed duplicates so there were only unique port and ship names as the end points and carriers for the containers.’
‘Right.’
‘Then I began to write a formula intending to pull out data for use in a graph. However, I pretty soon found an error.’ Javed pointed to the screen. ‘Look at this container. SPKZ300176. The SPK is the owner identifier – in this case SeaPak. The Z specifies the container type product code, the six-figure number is the container identifier. This particular container pops up in May, June and July. It produces the same error in my formula too.’
Holm shook his head. ‘Which is?’
‘The start point and the end point are identical. Look, the container was loaded onto the boat in Felixstowe. The boat is the Excelsior and she makes regular trips between Rotterdam and Felixstowe. However, according to the records the container wasn’t offloaded in Rotterdam, but rather came back to Felixstowe. It never left the ship.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘In short, it means the container went from the UK and travelled to the Netherlands, but because it wasn’t disembarked, to all intents and purposes it never left English soil. Which means it was never checked when it came back to the UK. The records show the container had a domestic origin, hence it wasn’t flagged for inspection.’
‘So there could have been anything inside?’
‘Precisely. The set-up Cornish showed us at Felixstowe was redundant, because the container
